Getting our agenda heard

As the newly elected 5th district senator, Cathleen Galgiani is wasting no time making the needs of her district known to the Senate leadership.

As the newly elected 5th district senator, Cathleen Galgiani is wasting no time making the needs of her district known to the Senate leadership.

Excellent.

We understand the Central Valley is considered by most residents of the state's population centers to be California's outback. Poor. Relatively uneducated. Rural. And politically red.

This isn't a place where politicians flock for votes or come to fatten their campaign war chests.

But it is a place with needs that in many cases only government can address. Public safety, levee improvements and water quality are among them.

We are pleased that Galgiani has a newfound willingness to be aggressive with the Legislature's Democratic leadership. If that willingness was there before, not just with Galgiani but also the other lawmakers whose districts carved into San Joaquin County, it was not apparent.

One argument is that the new, more compact legislative districts make aggressive lobbying easier. It means the loyalties of our representatives won't be nearly so divided. Most of the legislative and congressional districts will lie inside the friendly confines of San Joaquin County after Jan. 1.

Galgiani said she's "already had probably three conversations" with Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg about this area's needs. Those talks, she said, were about foreclosures and the area's economic and public safety needs.

Not mentioned - and we assume not discussed - by the soon-to-be senator was high-speed rail, a Galgiani pet project for years but a project many Californians have come to question.

Other parts of the state are quickly recovering from the Great Recession. Real estate in the coastal population centers is doing well. Job growth and retail sales are on the mend in those areas too.

The Valley, always first into an economic downturn and the last out, is recovering. But the pace is painfully slow.